Freshkills Park

Parks Announces Freshkills Haiku Contest Winners

Freshkills Park celebrated National Poetry Month this April with its third annual Haiku Contest and asked to hear impressions, experiences, thoughts and ideas of what Freshkills Park is and will be — in haiku form. A haiku is a type of poem written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables for a total of 17 syllables. Winning entries were split the entries into two categories, Adult and Student, and our judges selected three Adult winners and one Student winner.

This year’s judges included Ava Chin, who writes the Urban Forager column for the NY Times; Patrick Morrissey, the author of Transparency (Cannibal Books, 2009), whose poems have appeared in New American Writing, Harp & Altar, Colorado Review, and other journals. Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and Requiem for the Orchard. He is the chair for the advisory board of Kundiman.org and a board member of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

The 2,200-acre site has begun the transition from closed landfill to world-class park. Freshkills Park will have five main areas: the Confluence, North Park, South Park, East Park and West Park. Each area will have a distinct character and programming approach, developed in response to site opportunities and constraints, public meeting and stakeholder input, agency input, operation and maintenance concerns, and feasibility of implementation. The plan seeks to ensure that Freshkills Park will support richly diverse habitats for wildlife, birds and plant communities, as well as provide extraordinary natural settings for recreation--sports and programs that are unusual in the city, including horseback riding, mountain biking, nature trails and large-scale public art and cultural programming.